Suite 212

Suite 212 is Paik's "personal New York sketchbook," an electronic collage that presents multiple perspectives of New York's media landscape as a fragmented tour of the city. Opening with the 1972 work The Selling of New York, a series of short segments designed for WNET's late-night television schedule, Paik critiques the selling of New York by multinational corporations, and the city's role as the master of the media and information industries. Russell Connor is the ubiquitous television announcer whose droning statistical information on New York is ridiculed by a series of "average" New Yorkers; a burglar steals the TV set on which we see his talking head. Intercut throughout this comic scenario are appropriated Japanese TV commercials of American products. At the core of Suite 212 is a series of short collaborative pieces that form an accelerated, vibrant romp through New York neighborhoods. Street interviews with Douglas Davis' neighbors, Jud Yalkut's rendering of a Chinatown noodle shop and a colorized walk along the bridge to Ward's Island, and Paik and Shigeko Kubota's hallucinatory tour of the Lower East Side with Allen Ginsberg are among the segments in this dizzying time capsule of New York in the 1970s.

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